Alison Phillips Editor, Daily Mirror Media Masters – September 26, 2018 Listen to the podcast online, visit www.mediamasters.fm Welcome to Media Masters, a series of one to one interviews with people at the top of the media game. Today, I’m here in Canary Wharf, London, and at the offices of the Daily Mirror, joined by their editor in chief, Alison Phillips. Previously in charge of the Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, she was also launch editor of New Day, the short-lived newspaper, in 2016. She also leads on addressing gender imbalance at Mirror publisher Reach, heading up their Women Together network, and is this year’s Society of Editor’s popular columnist of the year. Alison, thank you for joining me. Hi. Alison, you were appointed in March. It must have been an incredibly proud moment for you, how is it going? It’s going really well, I think. I hope. It’s been a busy few months, because obviously Reach has bought the Express as well, so there have been a lot of issues going on. But in terms of the actual paper at the Mirror, I hope, I feel, that we’re reaching a point of sustained confidence, which is so important for a paper. We’ve had some real success on campaigns, which I think is really our lifeblood. And I think we’re managing to energise the staff, which is absolutely essential for a well-functioning newspaper. Is it more managerial at the moment with the organisational challenges that you’ve been dealing with? Because you must, as the leader of the business, as the editor, you’ve got so many things you could be doing, you’ve got to choose, having to prioritise. Yes, well Lloyd Embley is editor-in-chief of Reach, so his time is taken up on all that management stuff. I am trying to focus as much of my time as I possibly can on the actual paper, because that’s ultimately what matters. And that’s the bit I enjoy doing most as well, so that’s, I think, the key at the moment, because we need to get the paper absolutely solid and confident and out there in people’s minds. And then, I can sort of maybe leave some of the other stuff for other people to do. Because it’s an incredible brand. The first ever paper I picked up as a kid was the Daily Mirror. Was it really? Yes, very much so. Yes, it’s an amazing brand. It’s a fantastic part of the national fabric. What it’s done over the years is truly amazing; I never cease to bore people on this. One of my favourite topics is that how, when after the Titanic went down, and there weren’t enough lifeboats for the poorer people, the people that had been steerage, it was the Mirror that campaigned to have lifeboats for every member of a ship that was going out to sea. That was just an extraordinary sort of bit of social change, which the Mirror led. The really famous front-page image of seal clubbing back in the ‘60s was what sort of really led the way in the attitudes towards the fur trade, and then the Mirror was also at the front of creating the World Wildlife Fund as well. And that’s just some of them, there’s endless examples of how the Mirror has shaped this country, and that’s, I think, its role as a brand. It can be an amazing force for good, and that’s what I think we need to focus on. Did you feel a kind of sense of august heritage that might weigh heavily on other people? Because in one sense, you’re new in post, you’ve got to make some changes, but you don’t want to pull on the string of the tapestry and the whole thing unravels. You’ve got to choose which bits to keep and which bits need attention. Yes, and so in terms of did I feel that quite heavily, I feel it very heavily. You seem quite jovial and jolly! No. No, I feel it very heavily, and I’m a sort of a bit of an anorak about Mirror history as well. So you read all the old Cudlipp books, and you read the political history of the Mirror, and you see the role that it has played. And continuing to do that is vitally important, and I think perhaps now more than ever, there is a real need for a popular left of centre, open minded, big-hearted tabloid newspaper, because the concern is that you’ve got a lot of papers that either have been on the right or shifting to the right – which is fine, that’s their prerogative – but then on this side of the debate, you’ve got, the concern is that press is really just becoming much more for the chattering, Islington classes, and they’re the broadsheet readers. The Guardian readers. The Guardian readers, and the Observer, and the i, and all that, which is fine, but… They’re all very worthy. Exactly, but essentially a little bit dull. But also who is creating news for people who haven’t got a university education, who haven’t got much time, who’ve got very busy 2 lives, because they’re working, and they’ve got kids, or they just haven’t got the time in their lives to be reading 2,000 words on something or other, who wants popular news done in an interesting and accessible fashion, but with a reasonableness and a sense of social conscience. Again, I sound a bit pompous, but I don’t think you can ever underestimate the importance of the Daily Mirror in our national democracy. Well, left of centre, left leaning working people that want to read a tabloid is an underserved market. Massively, so that’s why it’s so important that not only do we do what we do every day, but we’re kind of noisier about it, and we make sure people are coming to us. And that is our responsibility. It’s not enough to say, “Well, we create a newspaper every day,” but we’ve got to create that newspaper, and then we’ve got to get it into people’s hands, and we’ve got to get it into people’s heads. Obviously, you’re working sort of in the newspaper on a daily basis, getting out the door, but when you’re kind of reflecting and steering in the right direction and working on the newspaper, which direction are you going to take it in? What changes are you going to make? What is kind of top of your to do list in the short to medium term? To be noisier about what we do. I think what we do is good and has been good for a very long time. I think we need to pay as much attention as we can to breaking exclusive stories and creating a news agenda. It’s not good enough any more just to rely on news of the day when that news of the day is already everywhere. Everybody knows the top line of every story, so you’re either giving them something additional, some interpretation, some analysis, something behind the scenes, which a lot of our readers want, and they want sort of complicated issues around Brexit explained in an accessible fashion. So you’re either doing that, you’re giving them greater depth to that story, or you’re creating new stories. We have to do that if we are to survive. And is there a kind of Daily Mirror view on Brexit? Because a lot of these issues cut across families, cut across political parties? I’ve got many lefty friends that are Remainers and some that are Brexiteers. Corbyn, is obviously a Brexiteer dressed up as a Remainer. How do you have a Daily Mirror view on that? Because in a sense, you’re going to have David Cameron’s problem in that the minute you come out on one side, you’re going to alienate the other half. Yes. It’s been really tricky for us in that our readers voted just about to remain, but by a fairly small margin, and we were very anxious that we didn’t want to fall into this narrative that we’ve seen elsewhere where people who voted to leave were somehow demonised as racist, or stupid, or sort of parochial. So, we understand, or I feel I understand, why a lot of people did vote to leave. And you can get into long debates about whether that was reality they were voting on or whether it was emotion. In a way, that’s almost irrelevant, because that is why they voted, and now, as we go through the Brexit negotiations, I think we have to keep those feelings at the forefront of our mind that that is why they voted, and we respect that. We are now sort of thinking, “Okay, so what would a second vote mean?” I am very nervous 3 about a second vote, only because I think that all the forces that we’ve seen in recent months and years around populism are fuelled by when people feel that they’re ignored, and saying to all the people that voted to leave that actually that maybe that isn’t going to happen after all, I think could have devastating impacts.